Thank you, Chair, and thank you to all the witnesses for your opening testimonies.
Mr. Dehghantanha, at our committee meetings, we heard testimony that AI has fundamentally changed the nature of cyber-attacks, moving from tools that would assist hackers in their operation to tools and systems that can now autonomously build attack plans, create multiple strategies, troubleshoot, and find workarounds when they generally fail. We even heard an example of AI rewriting its own code to avoid shutdown. We also heard about a third party foreign actor who was able to breach over 100 million data points from citizens in Mexico without a human directing each and every step.
This obviously raises a wide variety of potential national security concerns, and I know that your research sits exactly at this intersection. In plain terms, how close are we to a scenario in which an AI-powered attack could compromise Canadian infrastructure, the financial system or other national security apparatus structures?